This was an interesting read and it explored the concepts of death and life after death in a really unique way. It felt slow moving a lot of the time, but it worked out well as the slower pace allowed me to really get inside the heads of the characters.

I was provided a free copy of this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks, Netgalley!

I've never read Don DeLillo before and had heard that he is hard to read. I think I can agree with this, but not in the way I had expected--convoluted plot, epic scale, etc. Fundamentally the plot of this book is simple and straightforward: man can cheat death and be restored to youth and health at some point in the future. I mean, that's kind of the principle behind modern cryogenic theory. Much like real life, we don't know if it actually works in the book, but people are so seduced by it that it doesn't matter.

I think it's more beneficial to talk about how I felt than what the book is about. This is a complicated book to read, not for the plot itself, but because of its heavy philosophical overtones and the sheer number of times that I found it necessary to set the book down and go down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts. I enjoyed it immensely. So if this is something that you enjoy doing, I think you'll enjoy the book as well.

it's a delillo novel so it's got all the tropes: isolation, fear of death, disconnection from society, etc. etc. but unlike White Noise this one doesn't have any absurdist comedy it just has a bunch of grey and soulless characters endlessly spouting multipage monologues. there aren't even that many characters in it so the back-and-forth dialogues that make White Noise so great are just replaced by the main character's internal monologues. in fact, all this book did was make me want to re-read White Noise, which did everything better. go read that instead.

Review can also be read on my blog: A Poised Quill :)

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This book...is weird. I did not find it creepy, but I did find it disturbing (and not in a good way). I found it very strange and incomprehensible. I did not understand what was happening half the time. All the characters keep spouting random thoughts in rote monotone and always off on tangents that it kept me wondering whether they were high, heavily medicated, or just...crazy.

Do not expect all the science stuff you'd usually anticipate when you hear the word "cryonic suspension." There is very minimal science explained in this book. I'm not even sure that this can be classified as science-fiction. It's more philosophical and...morbid. I found myself wanting to quit the entire time I was reading it; I found myself breathing a sigh of relief when I finished it. And by my standards, that's not a very good thing to feel when reading a book.

Maybe I'm just not smart enough for this book. Or maybe I read it at the wrong time with the wrong mindset. This isn't what I'd identify as an easy read nor a fast read. This isn't even a thrilling read. It's mostly questions and deep realizations of Jeffrey Lockhart, about mortality, and about the idea of re-living again. Much can be said about Jeffrey's cynicism and his absolute doubt of his father's cult-like science called the Convergence, but that was not cultivated well to turn this book into something remotely interesting. I pained through 200 pages of him complaining and contemplating, and then complaining again, and then contemplating again. Add a few pages of Artis Martineau's convoluted inner monologue frustrated me even more. For some inconceivable reason, All I could think about while reading it was the word 'pretentious.'

I'm finding a hard time explaining my rating on the book (2 stars) because to be humbly and completely honest, I did not understand the point of it. At all.

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"These are soporifics of normalcy, my days in middling drift." -- Yes, you got that right. This is how I felt reading through this book.

In Zero K, a young man goes with his father and his father's wife, terminally ill, to a complex where she will go through cryopreservation. Although the idea is that this would allow her to be healed in a hypothetical future, before all the physical process of preparing her body for this, there is an equally important process of preparing her mentally to understand the boundaries of her life.

Although seemingly anecdotal, this young man has the habit of defining words. Any word that he comes across with, he tries to define it in simpler terms. And this is what the book, in a way, does about life: trying to show us what it means, and what it would be when it is over. Similarly, we witness the contrast between the lives of his father and wife and his own: while the older generation are at the end of their journey, he is at the beginning of his, and while affected by their decisions, he still goes on taking his own.

Spoiler

It also shows how even if we consider ourselves prepared for death, we might still try to stay alive: the main character's father is initially willing to "die" with his wife, but when she finally goes through the last steps before the cryopreparation, he is scared and decides not to do it himself. After that, he is lost in despair, finding out how much he misses her, and how important she was in his life, and so he ends up his own life prematurely, going back to the complex to join her.

Zero K has been my second book from [a:Don DeLillo|233|Don DeLillo|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1401807364p2/233.jpg], with [b:Submundo|10397684|Submundo|Don DeLillo|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1355248538s/10397684.jpg|2968156] being the first one (which I read in its Spanish translation): if I had to define Underworld in a couple of words, I would say it was a book about life. About the lives of different people in the US, about their lifetimes and the experiences that made them. Zero K would be, then, a book about dead: about the end of that existence, with plenty of deep discussion about what makes us humans, what makes us or our lives relevant.